Please just give us the /me color text back with an on/off toggle, that's all you had to do. Not only do the "announcement" colors get pretty lost in the chat anyway, they don't seem to work with bots or Streamdeck text commands, rendering them pretty useless even if they could be seen well.

Were fake donations that didn't make a sound or alert really that huge of a problem that the color text feature had to be taken away from everyone?

Well for a moment there I thought "wow Twitch has actually (finally) listened to it's people?" then I read the full "announcement"... This sort of half hearted response when the actual solution is clear is why I left Twitch almost a year ago. Honestly seeing this just reinforces that leaving was the right call after all.

I love how this was done on April 1st because it's obviously a joke...

When raiding someone and spamming your raid messages it was nice to add some color to it but now it's just blah and boring.
If I remember correctly the reason why this was removed is because people were using the command to do fake donations. I had this done to me and I never was fooled by it either because it takes an actual donation to make a sound go off. <---------

So once again twitch misses the point and this is further proved by being done on April 1st.

Thanks for nothing.

Love how this is not at all what we asked for. Just bring back the colored text with an option to disable it within a user's account settings. Or, better idea, add color blindness options as well. That way every user can decide individually for themselves if they want colored messages or italics.

Honestly, that's what you should have done in the first place. More choice in customizing the UI/UX is always better. That's why not one, but TWO browser extensions have been created just to make your site a more pleasant (see also: bearable) experience.

Here's what removing /me did:
Push streamers, that used /me for the colours, to tell their viewers to use third party chat clients or browser plug-ins.

That's really all that has happend.

This "announce" took so incredibly long to be implemented (nearly a year), and here we are.. still using /me with colours. Just not visible to new people on the site.

The best possible solution would've been: A on & off toggle for the old /me command. Boom, solved it for those that didn't like /me command and allowed /me for those that enjoy it. Easy. From there you can look into everyone/mod-only settings.

A quick side-note: /announce doesn't show up at all in third party chat clients. Literally making the message that's being send invisible. Just a heads up on how "visible" you really made these important announcements. :)

This doesn't seem to be implemented in the existing IRC protocol, sending `/announce something` from a bot doesn't seem to do anything, nor can I find an outgoing packet in the websockets from the browser.

How can we (developers) let bots utilize this functionality?

Why bringing this back for broadcaster/mods only?
A LOT of communities had great fun utilizing /me colored messages for everyone and it's been the top requested feature to be brought back.

PLEASE just let the broadcaster decide on how they want to do it, it can't be too hard to add it as a channel setting. Currently people use FFZ to override this anyway....

/announcement increases the size of messages because of the header; for bots that uses multiple messages (like mini chatgames and such) it's just going to create a big cluster spam that will make the chat unreadable. The feature itself is nice for single occasional messages for sure, but is also a misdirection from the original request.

What is the problem with big companies not being able to listen to legitimate feedback? You took down something people liked, and now you "solved" the issue by not re-implementing it, and doing something else. Just to put a check mark on it. This isn't a partial release, this is a poor choice and a slap in the face to your customers.

@dowski you guys did not listen to the community completely we wanted the /me that colored the chat text back and give the streamer the choice if they want chatters to be able color their text or not

/announcement should also allow you to Pin the comment for a duration of the stream, just my two cents.

This new announcement feature is not the solution any of us asked for. Why is this so difficult?

Wait, why did you combine the two? Some of us wanted /me back the way it was. /announcement is something totally different.

I was excited when I read this, but in testing I am a little disappointed. This does add a nice little effect that you can see in chat but if you use an IRC chat client it doesn't show the message that was posted at all and instead a blank line.

I agree it should be an option left to the streamer to adjust, it can be disabled by default to help address the edge cases of people getting duped

/announcement doesn’t address my use-case: interaction with commands to bots. My stream is based around using /me to give commands to bots, and ever since the styling change its very hard to distinguish bot commands from regular chat.

... is it really THAT difficult to make it into a setting? Let the streamer choose if they want to enable the colour for the chat or not.
We're all happy. End of story.

It would be nice if the announcement feature had some sort of pseudo-pinned post effect. For example, when I use /announce, that message will stay at the top of the chat box for ~30 seconds (amount of time could be settable, similar to predictions length), and after that it'll clear from the top and just be a regular message wherever it was sent.

For super busy chats, there's a very real possibility that the announcements will still not be seen, and this is a way to help them stand out more and actually be seen, which is what I believe their intention is. =)

The new announcements are great! But a little enhancement that would go a long way would be if they could be "pinned" to the top of chat for 30 seconds or so (similar to how Youtube handles broadcaster messages) so that chat could always have a chance to see them. While announcements will be great in smaller chats, in fast-moving chats they may still go unnoticed, and doing something like that would go a long way to making them more effective at communicating important messages.

It is a way to distinguish, but its not exactly what was asked for.

I like this new addition, but it would be better if the word announcement and megaphone also matched the side bars.